1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to data transmission and in particular to reducing datastream transmission bandwidth. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to reducing the bandwidth consumed in transmission of a datastream by encoding image data within the datastream through a compression algorithm.
2. Description of the Related Art
The revolution in data processing system speed has brought about a corresponding expansion of the types of tasks performed by data processing systems. In the field of image processing, data processing systems now receive, process, and produce all manner of images and image-embedded documents. Many, if not most, of these tasks involve the transmission of images between a data processing system and a peripheral device or another data processing system. Examples of such tasks include the printing of a paper document, the acquisition of a digital image from a digital camera, and the viewing of a web page.
The capacity of interlinks between data processing systems, frequently called available bandwidth, has improved at a substantial pace, and the capacity of interlinks between data processing systems and their peripherals has also improved, although at a frustratingly slow pace. Because of the long process of standardization in peripheral interfaces and protocols for machine interaction, revolutionary improvements in available bandwidth have arrived only very slowly. The traffic across the available bandwidth in many applications, however, has increased at a much faster pace.
Digital cameras provide an excellent example of this phenomenon. The last few years have witnessed a tremendous improvement in the pixel resolution of the images captured by digital cameras, but this revolution in resolution has exponentially increased the size of the image files that must be transported between the camera peripheral and the data processing system that processes the image files. The stagnation in capacity of the available interlinks has created tremendous frustration among users as they wait for images to upload from the digital camera to the data processing system.
Other examples include the increasing reliance on images in ever more sophisticated desktop publishing applications, and the ubiquitous images that have turned the worldwide web from a text-based interface to a complicated multimedia experience. In the case of the worldwide web, it was once predicted that the images embedded in web pages would eventually bring the internet to a standstill. Though the prophets of doom predicted an outcome far more bleak than reality, the frustration of waiting for large images embedded in web pages to download is a disturbingly common experience, especially for users of dial-up modems, which communicate over conventional telephone lines.
With no immediate hope of expanding the bandwidth available for the transmission of image data between data processing systems and between data processing systems and their peripherals, and with the volume of image data transmitted increasing almost daily due to improvements in image acquisition, image processing, and data storage, what is needed is a method of reducing the bandwidth consumed in transmission of a datastream by encoding image data within the datastream through a compression algorithm. Such a method would reduce perceived delay in transmissions and correspondingly reduce the frustration of users who wait impatiently as image content is delivered to their data processing systems, their printers, or their web terminals.